ARTS/ARTIFACTS

ARTS/ARTIFACTS; Unfurling the Japanese Love Affair With Umbrellas

By RITA REIF

Published: May 16, 1993

A geisha flirts from under a parasol on a woodblock print. Skeletons parade with a skeletal umbrella across a four-panel screen. And cyclists on an etching speed along beneath a moving roof of red umbrellas.

Japanese paper parasols -- open, closed or shredded -- have long inspired artists to create memorable images on objects, some of which are assembled in "Rain and Snow: The Umbrella in Japanese Art," at the Japan Society Gallery in Manhattan, through June 27.

The wealth of material presented -- 160 paintings, prints, porcelains, photographs, books, textiles, sword fittings, shop signs and modern parasols -- documents 400 years of the history and mythology of umbrellas in Japan, where the rainfall exceeds England's.

"The subject of the umbrella in Japanese art was uncharted territory," said Julia Meech, a New York art historian who was the guest curator and wrote the catalogue ($32).

Unlike paper fans, umbrellas were rarely decorated by artists until the 20th century. The show's catalogue illustrates some exceptions, including the oldest known Japanese umbrellas: a set of three bright red parasols ablaze with gilded flowers. Made in 1808 for a shogun's bride, these long-handled artifacts -- one for sun and two for rain -- were part of her trousseau. They are now in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya.

"The Japanese umbrella is fragile, easily damaged and soon discarded," Ms. Meech explained. This vulnerability has inspired artists to invest the torn umbrella with many meanings. On a 19th-century textile, snowflakes are interspersed with tattered umbrellas as metaphors for the ephemeral in life. Something more perilous is suggested on an 18th-century sword guard, which depicts a man cowering under a broken umbrella while searching for demons.

The umbrella makers' world comes alive in many other items, including an anonymous late-19th-century photograph of two craftsmen at work in a sea of papered spokes. A woodblock image shows an artisan waterproofing a paper cover -- oiling it with one hand, twirling it with the other. On a print by Kuniyoshi, an umbrella maker chases after his parasols, which have been blown skyward by the wind. And an ivory toggle, called a netsuke and carved in the shape of a rat nibbling an umbrella, is a reminder of the problem posed by rodents: They would invade the parasol workshops to eat the paste that fastened the paper covers to the frames.

To Ms. Meech, the most surprising images to surface in her research were 19th-century stoneware sake bottles shaped like closed umbrellas whose bamboo handles serve as the necks of the bottles. "I'd never seen any like them before," she said.

Umbrellas came to Japan via China in the fourth century. Nine hundred years later they were illustrated in narrative scrolls. Since the 17th century they have been widely used and documented in art.

Among the show's earliest objects is a painted screen made before 1650 that shows a procession of picnickers led by a woman carrying a parasol. Some of the most amusing items are the umbrella-shaped salt and pepper shakers, 20th-century silver souvenirs from Yokohama.

Of course, the impact of Japanese art on the West went far beyond souvenirs. The 19th-century woodcuts by two Japanese masters of printmaking, Hokusai and Hiroshiga, had a profound influence on Western artists. This is evident in Friederich Capelari's "Umbrellas," a 1915 work in which Viennese schoolgirls are seen in the rain, and in Felix Valotton's "Shower" from 1894, showing Parisians in a downpour. Japanese imagery also swept late-19th-century America, changing even hardware. A bronze doorknob made in 1879 in New Britain, Conn., takes the form of a Japanese woman with a parasol.

The paper umbrella, a pop-culture item in Japan through the 1920's, when 10 million were made annually, is now an endangered species. As the more durable steel-framed umbrellas in the Western style have proliferated, production of paper versions has declined to 100,000 a year, with 70,000 made in the city of Gifu, near Nagoya. Today's parasols, of both paper and silk, are used mostly by actors, dancers and other entertainers.

The 20 modern umbrellas in the exhibition, lent by the Gifu City Museum of History, are splendid miniature domes patterned with calligraphy, flowers or brilliant swirls of color. They are, unfortunately, easily overlooked because they have been installed high above the rest of the displays and are partially concealed by wall and ceiling panels. It's a pity that no one thought to present them as they are seen in so many artworks -- massed together in one large grouping, as if carried by a crowd in a rainstorm.

In contrast, a high point of the exhibition is the loveliest of all umbrellas -- a transparent parasol of purple silk that a Kabuki dancer in the role of a heron used for wings.

Photo: Included in the Japan Society show is, above left, an embroidered paper umbrella from the 1820's; a 19th-century ivory netsuke, at left, that depicts a rat eating the paste used in umbrella making, and a late-1800's photograph of an artisan's shop. (Photographs from the Japan Society)